October 2017 | VOL. 14, ED 3.

I’ve been there and done that, clean needle program worker tells clients Margie Randle dabbled with injecting heroin in Adelaide as a teenager but when she moved to Sydney, aged 18, in 1981, the drug took hold.

“Heroin was all the rage then,” she says.

“Everyone was doing it. Move to Sydney in 1981 as an 18-year-old. What could possibly go wrong?”

She still uses very occasionally now as a 55-year-old and is on suboxone.

“I can’t use all the time now; it’s too much hard work.” But Margie strongly feels that her authenticity helps her immensely in her part-time job as a clean needle worker for Hepatitis SA in Adelaide.

She works mainly out of sites in Port Adelaide and Warradale in the suburbs of Adelaide. The clean needle program (CNP) workers in South Australia work what they call either ‘fixed’ or ‘sessional’

sites; a sessional site is what workers in other states call ‘secondary’ sites.

used to do that’ they are not as wary anymore, and are more trusting.

Both Port Adelaide and Warradale have a large client base from nearby public housing. Margie says she cuts through potentially months of small-talk by just letting clients know that she understands their world first-hand. She sees her role as fostering trust.

“It cuts through a lot of time. Otherwise you have to work a lot harder to get their trust. If they know you have been there they are more open.”

“As soon as you identify yourself as someone who has injected drugs their whole stance changes. Clients are waiting to be discriminated against or are really wary about what they say and don’t want to ask questions. They just want to come in and leave quickly. But once you say something like ‘yeah - I

When Margie started injecting, there was no such thing as clean needle programs. “When I first started using there were no CNPs or anything like that. We had to buy glass syringes from medical suppliers and everyone shared.

CNPs are just amazing.

“It’s a really important thing to get people educated and using clean equipment and keep them as healthy as possible while they are using drugs.”

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